Lara Logan: What I've Learned

Reporter, 41, Washington, D.C.

A correspondent for CBS News and 60 Minutes, Logan won an Emmy for her work in Iraq. During the Egyptian revolution in 2011, she was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob.

Interviewed November 1, 2012

I'm always gonna be crazy about dishes in the sink. Crazy! Because it's a sign of disrespect. It says that you think someone else is going to clean up after you, that you're not prepared to do it yourself. At least scrape them and stack them, right? Shit. Are you kidding me?

My father taught me a lot. But I think the lesson that really stuck out was: Don't settle for less than what you can be. If I was gonna be a lawyer, he'd say, "Lawyers get told what to do by judges. Be a judge."

There was a time in the world when we honestly thought if people just know that this is happening, no one will stand for it.

If you care about injustice, and if you care about freedom, and you care about human rights, then you care about them everywhere.

Seeing death is not as difficult as you might think. What's harder is to see people suffer. It's the people the dead left behind that get to you.

After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.

I looked into the people's eyes as they were assaulting me and begged them to stop. And I could see that there was no feeling for me whatsoever. The people assaulting me were devoid of not just compassion but that sense of care for a woman.

I'm not haunted by what happened to me. I never had any desire for vengeance. I never felt any need, even, for justice. Now I feel if I say something about it, people try and use it in certain ways and make it something that it's not. It is what it is to me. It happened. And actually, I got breast cancer a year after, and I think that scarred me worse than what happened in Egypt. When Egypt was over, it was over. I got on a plane, I came home, and I was thousands of miles away, and I had a choice. My choice was very rational. Are you going to take the life that you've been given, or are you not going to live it? Are you going to live it fully, freely — or are you not? Are you gonna be a victim — or are you not?

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It's not that I never think about it. I don't need to pretend that it doesn't have an effect on me. But I see the world for what it is. And I see my world for what it is.

If you're a fighter with a commander, you can question the commander. You can question his morality. But if the orders come from God, you can't question God. So religion changes the nature of the conflict.

You have to live in the dirt if that's how the people around you are living. You have to know what it feels like to be that exhausted, or to be that hot, or to be that hungry — or to be all of those things at the same time. You have to know what it means to sit in a refugee camp in Darfur and look at these people and think: You know, I'm going to go back to a shitty little house we've rented that doesn't even have a real shower, and it's going to be the shower of my life because I'm gonna have soap and water. You can't get that on Skype.

I knew when I went to Iraq while it was under Saddam Hussein that we were gonna invade, and I knew that was gonna be a dangerous time. I looked at the fact that there were at least a hundred journalists left in Baghdad. And I thought, Well, they've never had a hundred journalists die in an invasion, right? That doesn't happen. If ten died, it would be catastrophic. It would be historic. So I figured most of those people are gonna live and be able to do their job and tell their story. So that's a risk I'm willing to take.

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What I love about my job is that everything is torn away. Yesterday, I went to our block party. I hadn't showered, I had sweatpants on, and I thought, Oh, God, I'm gonna be surrounded by all these moms that look like they just stepped out of the salon and have five kids and go to the gym and are keeping it all together. You don't have to worry about any of that in Afghanistan. You worry about the fundamental things of life. You don't have to get to the dry cleaners.

I never had any training with the camera. If you look at the camera and play to the camera, it's fake, right?

As I left the house, my mother used to say, "Drive safely," and I used to say, "What do you think I'm gonna do? Go out of my way to drive recklessly?" And my mother used to say, "For God's sake, could you just take the easy road for once in your life? Could you just say, 'Sure, Mom,' then walk out the door and do whatever you like behind the wheel?" But I was like, "No, it doesn't make sense to me that you would think that I would..." Of course, now I'm older, and I realize that's what moms do.

You don't have any idea what you're in for after you give birth. I once described it as being like the apocalypse. I was thirty-seven by the time I had my first child. I thought I knew myself pretty well. But I can't even remember the person I was. My husband does. I think he's still in mourning. You know, When's that girl coming back? I want that girl! Where I was number one, and her underwear matched.

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